Campus Arts Research

About

Campus Arts Research, led by Krannert Art Museum curator and affiliate faculty in art history Amy L. Powell, is a program housed in the Office for Arts Integration. Campus Arts Research commissions one to three significant works of contemporary art each academic year for the UIUC campus. Projects vary in their form and scope, and may include public art, video and film screenings, performances, exhibitions, and ephemeral experiences that have a lasting impact. The program values visual artists with research-driven practices who will benefit from the expansive resources our campus offers. As such, we do not always emphasize a finished public outcome, and we often invite artists to conduct exploratory residencies and site visits that cultivate experimentation with scale and ideas and that may lead to future projects (realized here or elsewhere).  

We value process. The duration of curatorial work is long and unfolds through cultivated and reciprocal relationships. Campus Arts Research is open to, and supports, the campus’s existing strengths in the arts, sciences, humanities, and innovative emerging technologies; and we stretch our capacities and intellectual frameworks by embracing the nuances and live questions that contemporary visual artists pose through their work. We are committed to developing deep knowledge about, and expanding upon, the ways we inhabit and experience the University of Illinois campus, its forms of knowledge production, and all the places it reaches while at the same time holding onto critical self-awareness and curiosity about the university’s histories, its land use, power dynamics, and pedagogical and corporate missions as a land grant university.  

Please note: Campus Arts Research does not currently accept project proposals. Our work is carefully curated with our collaborators across disciplines and results from extensive research and studio visits in view of artistic, pedagogical, and civic impact.